They Speak

Hidden and not-so hidden agendas in the not-so
post-Cold War era

by Paul Street

Z magazine, November 1999, p25

The mainstream media in the United States crafts two different
versions of U.S. policy for two different audiences. The first
audience, call it (following the work of the late Australian propaganda
critic Alex Carey) the grassroots, comprises the general mass
of citizens whose essential role in society is to keep quiet and
do what they're told. In rare moments when media managers feel
the need to do more than just divert this sorry human rabble from
thinking about policy at all, as during times of U.S.-led war,
they feed it nonsense about America's supposed global humanitarianism.

The second target group comprises the relevant political class
of Americans from at most the upper fifth of society. Call this
audience (again following Carey) the treetops-the people who matter
and who deserve and can be trusted with something approximating
the real story. This segment includes such privileged and heavily
indoctrinated persons as corporate managers, lawyers, public administrators,
and university professors. Since these people carry out key societal
tasks of supervision, discipline, training, and indoctrination,
they cannot be too thoroughly misled about current events and
policy without deleterious consequences for the smooth functioning
of the dominant social and political order. At the same time,
information and commentary for the political class sometimes reflects
a degree of reasoned debate among its members as to how best to
manage the world in its interests.

Thus, media coverage of U.S. policy directed at the "elite"
is often quite candid, supplementing humanitarian pretexts with
a more forthright presentation of global realpolitik and "strategic
interests." An excellent example is a September 9, 1999 front-page
New York Times article titled "With Other Goals in Indonesia,
U.S. Moves Gently on East Timor." It managed to report without
irony the Clinton administration's explanation of why the U.S.
was "resisting direct threats of economic or military sanctions"
to punish Indonesia for its most recent brutal repression of the
East Timorese. Like most mainstream media coverage of the latest
Indonesian butchery, the Times deleted U.S. complicity in Indonesia's
genocidal occupation of East Timor since 1975. Still, America's
newspaper of record spoke in reasonably frank terms about the
decidedly non-humanitarian reasons that Indonesia would not be
subjected to anything like the rough U.S. treatment accorded to
Serbia, supposedly for crimes against Kosovar humanity. The reasons
mentioned included the United States' hope of "preserving
its [strategic economic, diplomatic, and military] relationship"
with the "fourth-largest country in the world" (Clinton
defense advisor Sandy Berger) and U.S. calculations that an aid
cutoff could precipitate a "new economic collapse" that
"could harm American corporations that have large investments
in Indonesia." As the Times explained the previous day, U.S.
officials feared that "economic sanctions would jeopardize
hopes for [Indonesian economic] recovery that foreign nations
have worked so desperately to foster." As the New York presses
rolled, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese worked desperately
to stay alive in the face of a vicious assault from a terror state
long financed, equipped, and trained by the United States.

The Hidden Hand & the Hidden Fist

The New York Times' heralded foreign policy columnist Thomas
Friedman gave a more elaborate, ambitious, and far-reaching example
of world capitalist candor last March. As the "humanitarian
bombing" of Serbia was just underway, Friedman published
an unapologetic manifesto on behalf of American imperialism in
the Sunday magazine. Beneath the cover picture of a U. S. flag
as a clenched fist, Friedman criticized Congressional neo-isolationists
for failing to see that "sustaining globalization" is
in America's "overarching interest" and has replaced
"containing communism" as "the big reason"
for bold U.S. militarism.

Friedman claimed that globalization-the official term for
what is better understood as the planetary extension of an inherently
expansionist political-economic system called capitalism-has replaced
the Cold War as the dominant new international system, but its
success is not inevitable. Without the planetary geopolitical
stability that only a strong and flexible U.S. military capacity
can provide, globalization can fall prey to regional disturbances
and to a dangerous social and political "backlash" that
will plunge humanity and American capitalism (which Friedman believes
have largely identical interests) into disarray. In Friedman's
view, the new imperialism required is not the "old fashioned"
variety, "when one country physically occupies another."
It consists of providing the muscle to create a "stable geopolitical
power structure" for economic activity to flow smoothly across
a planet already conquered by capitalism. Friedman argued in unanticipated-and
were he to know it probably unwelcome-synergy with Marxist political
scientist Ellen Meiksins-Wood. Meiksins-Wood recently distinguished
between an older imperialism in which leading capitalist states
conquered and competed over non-capitalist territories and a "new
imperialism" which "has more to do with relations within
a global capitalist system."

As she puts it: "Imperialism today is taking place in
the context of...the 'universalization' of capitalism. It is not
now primarily a matter of territorial conquest or direct military
or colonial control. It is not now a matter of capitalist powers
invading non-capitalist powers in order to bleed them dry directly
and by brute force. Now it is more a matter of ensuring that the
forces of the capitalist market prevail in every corner of the
world (even if this means marginalizing and impoverishing parts
of it), and of manipulating those market forces to the advantage
of the most powerful capitalist economies and the United States
in particular." Meiksins-Wood notes, "Military force
is still central to the imperialist project, in some ways more
than ever."

To Friedman, America's "overarching interest" in
providing world political stability is obvious. "Globalization,"
he wrote, "means the spread of free market capitalism to
every nation of the world." It also means the spread of "democracy,"
which he and other respectable intellectuals still (as in the
Cold War era) routinely conflate with capitalism. The United States
wins in a planet ruled by supposedly free market and democratic
capitalism, because it has "had 200 years to invent, regenerate,
and calibrate the checks and balances that keep markets free"
and "has many of the most sought-after goods and services
in the world market. . . Globalization-is-U.S. "

At the same time, however, globalization is for Friedman full
of dangers as well as opportunities for the United States. The
planetary "integration of free markets, nation states, and
information technologies like never before" allows "individuals,
corporations, and countries to reach around the world farther,
faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever." This makes global
investors and ordinary people unprecedentedly vulnerable to rapidly
spreading financial and related security crises radiating from
even the most seemingly remote corners of the planet. The new
threats arise not from a single, easily identifiable, and monolithic
enemy, as (supposedly) during the Cold War, but from such smaller,
more slippery, and less predictable threats as Manuel Noriega,
Saddam Hussein, Osam-bin-Laden ("the Saudi millionaire with
his own global network-Jihad Online"), Slobodan Milosevic
(the latest official U. S. reincarnation of "Hitler"),
and Latin-American and Asian financial meltdown.

These dangers seem slighter than those allegedly once presented
by the Soviet Union, but that's a dangerous illusion in Friedman's
view. The rise of a delicately interwoven and intricately wired
worldwide capitalism increases the costs of seemingly marginal
anti-systemic activity in the world. The speed with which economic
activity moves in the Information Age of Globalization intensifies
the impact of regional disturbances and worsens their effect on
international finance. Because everything is now so remarkably
interconnected across national boundaries, Friedman's credo runs,
events in the most backwater of places can have all sorts of corrosive
consequences for the whole system. Since the new economic forces
unleashed by global markets are deeply dislocating, moreover,
they provoke social and political resistance that threatens to
destroy the global system, leaving Uncle Sam all dressed up with
no world to dominate. The United States must therefore monitor
and police the planet with more diligence than ever.

The Clinton Doctrine

Friedman's manifesto is hardly the insignificant rhetoric
of an isolated pundit. The Washington-based columnist is known
to reflect official treetops policy statements and briefings.
Well enough regarded by the White House to accompany Madeline
Albright on state trips and strategically placed on the editorial
page of the country's most significant agenda-setting newspaper,
he has become what Amithabl Pal calls "a Pooh Bah of the
foreign policy elite. Whatever he says carries weight in lots
of [elite] circles."

A "careful reading of recent Administration and Pentagon
documents," noted global security expert Michael Klare early
in the NATO war, shows that Operation Allied Force was "part
of a larger [U.S.] strategic vision." At the heart of that
vision is "the assumption that as a global power with far-flung
economic interests, the United States has a vested interest in
maintaining international stability. Because no other power or
group of powers can guarantee this stability, the United States
must be able to act on its own or in conjunction with its most
trusted allies (meaning NATO)." This idea of using military
power to create a favorable global milieu for international investors
is a crucial component of what Klare called "the Clinton
Doctrine."

In explaining its global aims to fellow members of the policy
elite in 1993, Defense Department planners claimed that only U.S.
Ieadership could provide the "stability" to guarantee
"a prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of
peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two thirds of
the world economy." Last year Defense Secretary William Cohen
told the Boston Chamber of Commerce that NATO expansion would
provide the "stability" required to "attract investment"
to Eastern and Central Europe. The day before the initiation of
the bombing of Serbia, Bill Clinton candidly told a Washington,
DC audience that the United States would not be "free to
pursue" a progressive domestic policy without "a strong
economic relationship with the rest of the world that involves
our ability to sell around the world.... That's what this Kosovo
thing is all about." This comment was consistent with Clinton's
long-standing insistence that Americans should accept the logic
of economic globalism and "free trade" as "inevitable"
and in their interests. Yet, like Friedman and the Defense Department,
Clinton was not convinced that the triumph of world capitalism
was completely inevitable: globalization still depends on American
militarism.

A New Doctrine

Equally Friedman-esque was a speech delivered by British Prime
Minister Tony ("Toady") Blair in early April 1999 to
a classic treetops audience of 1,500 Chicago business leaders.
With approval and input from the Clinton administration, Blair
defended the U.S.-led NATO war in Yugoslavia, in terms of what
he and his White House sponsors called, a new "Doctrine of
International Community." Bowing to the standard pretexts,
Blair justified NATO's bombing as a "humanitarian" response
to Milosevic's Hitler-like ethnic cleansing and "genocide."
But he also accused "rogue" dictators like Hussein and
Milosevic of committing what capitalists in the regional cradle
of historical American isolationism likely saw as a greater sin:
threatening the geopolitical stability required for profitable
world economic flows. In the integrated world system created by
globalization, claimed Blair, "we are all internationalists
now," and "many of our domestic problems are caused
on the other side of the world." Fortunately, Blair concluded,
there exists a great new benevolent world power to provide the
proper mixture of guidance and discipline to keep the world safe
for supposedly democratic and free market capitalism-the United
States.

Blair's speech received favorable coverage in the Tribune
under the headline, "A New Doctrine for the Post-Cold War
Era."

Globalization

Thomas Friedman's thesis is consistent also with rival columnist
William Pfaff's critical but equally candid take on the U. S.
agenda in the post-Cold War era. The idiosyncratic Pfaff dissents
from what he considers to be the "utopian" notion (which
he links to Friedman) that "the solutions to the 'central
problems' [of humanity] have by now really been discovered and
are being applied, bringing history to its conclusion by means
of a global economic integration that will make the world over
in the mold of rich and happy America." In December 1998,
Pfaff, whose by-line appears regularly in the Chicago Tribune
and Los Angeles Times, wrote of the ill-fated Holbrooke-Milosevic
agreement of October that year as part of "Washington's grand
plan to make NATO into a global military force" free to operate
without interference from the UN. That plan was in turn a reflection,
by Pfaff's analysis, of U.S. policymakers' commitment to sustaining
"economic globalization"-a commitment he knew to reflect
core U.S. objectives put in place without discussion in any public
and democratic-representative forums: "Washington sees this
as a precedent for a new NATO which would deal with a variety
of existing and future problems inside and outside Europe... This
new vision sees [NATO] expanding throughout Eastern and Baltic
Europe, possibly taking in Russia itself, if that country stabilizes,
and incorporating other states that formerly were part of the
Soviet Union...AII of this adds up to an extraordinarily ambitious
new global program. The Clinton administration is revamping NATO
and redefining its mission in order to make it an instrument of
American world engagement as peacekeeper, peacemaker, and policeman...
This program has much support in the U. S. foreign policy community
but has never been seriously debated either in congress or across
the country.... It amounts to a globalization of U. S. strategy
and foreign policy in parallel with the economic globalization
and integration of world markets already well advanced."

During the Balkan bombing campaign, Pfaff noted that "NATO's
extension and redirection has been seen in Washington as part
of a desirable if not inevitable political 'globalization,' counterpart
to the economic globalization of the last few years, in both cases
U.S.-inspired and American-led." In numerous columns, he
has criticized that globalization as destructive, destabilizing,
and even imperialist.

Bad History

There is much to criticize from a radical perspective in the
most candid mainstream commentary on U.S. foreign policy. Recalling
that "economic globalization" is "a project as
old as gunboats" (John Pilger), we can start by noting that
since at least the 1890s U.S. foreign policy was fundamentally
premised on the idea that American capitalism could not survive
in its relatively liberal and democratic form ("corporate
liberal" in the language of New Left revisionist historians)
without access to an unrestricted global free trade and investment
system-the "Open Door." Open Door policy was driven
also by U. S. policymakers' belief that the special technological
and organizational capacities of American corporation capitalism
would ensure U.S. supremacy in an open, liberal, and properly
policed world economy. There is nothing particularly "post-Cold
War" about the U.S. drive for globalization or in the U.S.
notion that America wins in a globalized capitalism. The drive
remained critical, in fact, to U. S. Policy through the Cold War
as diplomatic historians have shown in considerable detail.

Also doing violence to the historical record is Friedman's
repetition of the doctrinal government story line that America's
enemy on the world stage has not disappeared but changed from
a monolithic Soviet-directed conspiracy to an assortment of indigenous
"rogue" nationalisms and related regional threats. That
line recycles preposterous and purposefully exaggerated Cold War
doctrine on the character of the Soviet threat, the "containment"
of which provided nearly 50 years of historically unmatched ,,cover
for U.S. imperialism. It belies the fact that U.S. foreign policy
in the Cold War era was deeply animated by fear of independent
nationalism and regionalism throughout the world.

There are many other dark historical patterns and consistencies
in the U.S. record before, during, and since the Cold War that
fall outside the boundaries of appropriate discussion within even
the better media commentary meant for the elite audience. Among
the more unacceptable topics, which can be touched upon in only
the most veiled and partial ways, if at all, within the mainstream
media,(we might)include U. S. policymakers' long-standing, persistent,
and all-too-successful determination to:

* Provide pretexts for massive defense budgets that provide
huge public subsidies to high-tech corporations within the military-industrial
complex while directing public resources away from broad social
expenditures that threaten the wealth and prerogatives of the
national business class as whole

* Enable U.S. multinational corporate exploitation of the
Third World, and maintain the division between a rich core and
impoverished periphery within the world capitalist system

* Use humanitarian pretexts as cover for an imperial global
agenda more frankly acknowledged in "treetops" (intra-elite)
discourse

Still, bad as it is, the coverage and commentary produced
for the treetops is often much better than the media swill generated
for mass society. Beyond the considerable amount of "ideologically
necessitated deletion" (Ward Churchill's excellent phrase),
the elite media content remains indispensable to those who want
to determine real agendas behind the fairy tales spun for the
masses.

They Speak

In John Carpenter's campy science-fiction/horror movie They
Live, America is ruled by aliens disguised as members of the business
and professional elite. The extraterrestrials manipulate the human
mass through subtle, subliminal forms of thought control encoded
in media content that both advances and hides the colonizers'
international (in fact intergalactic) agenda of economic exploitation.
They speak in hushed tones to one another through small radios
installed in Rolex watches that symbolize their exalted class
status while providing a safe conduit for intra-alien communication.
In an underground complex whose existence is kept secret from
the hated human herd, the colonizers speak openly and idealistically
of their real objectives to large audiences of fellow aliens and
a minority of co-opted human collaborators. They are resisted
by a dedicated human cadre that has discovered how to manufacture
special sunglasses that decode the numbing messages of the mass
media and reveal the hidden alien identity of the infiltrators.
Possessors of these glasses are tracked and gunned down by the
alien-dominated forces of order.

The parallels between current U.S. reality and the nightmarish
scenario depicted in They Live and in numerous other dystopian
fantasies are clear to radicals living in the American eye of
the world capitalist hurricane. Happily, however, we are not by
any indication subject to a ruling-class of alien or superhuman
lineage and we are generally free to manufacture and distribute
special de-coder sunglasses-radical social theory and criticism-without
fear of elimination by death squads (though our friends in numerous
U.S. client states still live with that dread). Of the need to
manufacture and distribute more of the radical visors there is
no doubt. But we can still, above ground and with our own eyes
or regular prescription lenses, make out significant parts of
the real agenda between the lines, lies, and diversions of the
ruling mainstream media, where all-too human elites still feel
the occasional need to communicate and even argue with one another
with a reasonable measure of candor about how they see the world
and what is to be done.

Paul Street is a research associate in U.S. Social Policy
and adjunct professor in U.S. History at Northern Illinois University.